"I've seen people get rich off crypto" and I've seen hundreds of gambling addicts lose their house and put their family on the street when the bet didn't go right. Even when you're talking about serious coins, ignoring the rug pulls. That money comes from somewhere. Who's holding the bag?
Crypto people tend to have an infinite dose of "f** you got mine" even if they didn't get theirs.
Yep, for every person who gains a dollar someone had to lose a dollar. No value was created. In this way crypto is actually a less than zero sum game since some money is always lost to the machine through sending to abandoned wallets, lost private keys, etc. So on average everyone loses.
if the seller is happy at the price they are selling at and the buyer is happy at the price they are buying at, where does the "someone had to lose a dollar" come from?
if the seller sold to the buyer, then it went up, the only "dollars lost" would be hypothetical opportunity cost had the seller decided to hold instead.
Essentially, the only thing that causes the price to go up is new people buying into the market. That's the only "value" here. This is why it's called The Greater Fool's theory, is you keep passing the bag over to the greater fool who will pay more for it than you.
For investments of which the only purpose is to make more money, right.
Of course it's not that black and white, since every investment technically has at least two utility purposes: 1) hedging 2) emotional utility (the false hope of getting rich).
Maybe but in theory those stocks are ‘usually’ tied to some other econmical activity other than mere speculation that the price will go up. In practice though, a lot of stocks have no fundamental value tied to their prices…
It's only zero sum when the total value of the space is fixed. That's obviously not the case here, since the total value of the space continues to expand.
The counter argument is that such cases contribute to scarcity, which reduces supply and therefore those who sell can demand more.
I don’t know though how sound this argument really is as I don’t see what value bitcoin has outside its monetary worth.
Can you really use this stuff? Not really. At best is a difficult to scale — if at all — database for transactions.
Though similar things could be said about paper money as well — that it is nothing but the agreed upon value — but at least that can exchange hands far more easily in a much more scalable and flexible manner.
There are many venues to gamble your money. You could also go for meme/penny stocks.
I personally have only Bitcoin and some small amount of ETH. I don't consider myself a gambler and think that these smaller cryptocurrencies are very far away from Bitcoin, which is very stable and safe these days as the toolset is quite developed.
It's unfortunate that the loudest advocates of crypto in the US and Europe are screeching libertarians and grifters/scammers. They drown out the everyday users in far off places like Argentina and Nigeria that nobody (in the US and Europe) seem to care about.
That's because it's harder to see the forest for the trees when you're out in the woods. Just like the author of this blog post, users in Argentina and Nigeria aren't going to stop and think about the far-reaching problems with crypto if that crypto is helping them with their day-to-day lives.
Crypto people tend to have an infinite dose of "f** you got mine" even if they didn't get theirs.